


chilled

by 1001cranes



Series: 2k18 WIP Amnesty [3]
Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 02:10:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13377912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: "Everything's real somewhere," Jareth says.





	chilled

Toby wakes abruptly. He sits straight up in bed with not enough air in his lungs, and the front of his blankets wet and sticky. That’s not so unusual; the weird part is the man standing in the corner of his room – tall, with strange, blond hair and glittering eyes. An owl sitting on his shoulder.

Toby swallows. His throat is dry, almost painfully so. “Who are you?”

The man gives him an amused look. “Oh, Toby. You know that already, don’t you?”

Toby looks at him.  _ Really _ looks. And the man’s eyes draw him in, so strangely, and it feels like he’s falling – falling, and falling, and falling, like slipping into a deep abyss, and the name is torn out of him as suddenly as it comes to him. 

“Jareth?”

Jareth smiles. “There you are.” He touches Toby’s face, his cheek, and Toby smiles involuntarily. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah.”

“A very long time,” Jareth says, and Toby’s head is a maelstrom, a tempest in a teacup, all these whirling, swirling things rolling around in his brain.

"I didn't think you were real," Toby says. Dumbly, he thinks. Who tells a person sitting right in front of them you ever thought they weren’t real? 

But if cats could smile, particularly after catching canaries or getting cream, they would smile like Jareth is now. 

"Everything's real somewhere," Jareth says.

If Toby stopped to think about it, that probably wasn't particularly comforting.

“Why are you here?” he asks instead. “Now, I mean.”

Another one of those strange, enigmatic smiles. “You called for me.”

"I didn't!" It bursts out of Toby, stung. "I didn't, I--"

"In your sleep," Jareth continues, smoothly. "You called my true name. So few in your world do - I was curious to see who it was.” 

Something about Jareth’s eyes aren’t quite human, Toby realizes. The shape is right, the color only unusual - something about the way they move?

“You remember don’t you? My labyrinth.”

“Of course!” Toby had been obsessed with labyrinths as a child, with mazes and puzzles and fairy tales, with all the stories and books his sister had left behind when she’d fled to college and grad school and beyond. They’re never been quite right, of course, and now it seemed so clear why. “Of course I remember, how --”

_ How could I forget _ , he wanted to say, but of course he had. He’d forgotten a little. 

“Will I forget again?” Toby asks. “When you leave?” 

“You might. You’re older now. Stronger.” Jareth shrugs. “Then again, when you wake up in the morning, you might convince yourself it was all a dream.”

Toby’s face falls. “I just…I want to remember, I want --”

_ I want to see the labyrinth. _

Jareth is smiling as though Toby had said it aloud. “You could remember everything if you came with me to the labyrinth.” 

He almost doesn’t think about it. 

_ Please _ .  _ Please, take me away to the Goblin Kingdom. Right now _ . 

The words are at his lips immediately, as if they’ve always been waiting. 

“I…” Toby leans back a little, slowly. “But I couldn’t come back, if I went.” He knows this as certainly as he knows the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. Did Sarah tell him so? Did she tell him about the labyrinth? 

“No,” Jareth says, and the owl on his shoulder hoots softly, moving from foot to foot. “You already left once, you couldn’t again. Even I couldn’t let you. Rules are rules, I'm afraid. Even for kings."

Tears well up in the corner of Toby’s eyes, unbidden.  _ It isn’t fair _ , he thinks,  _ it isn’t fair to remember only to forget again. _

“Now, now,” Jareth says, not unkindly. He swipes gently at the skin just under each one of Toby’s eyes. “No need to look so upset. A great many people never see me at all – very few get to see me  _ again _ , I assure you. Or my kingdom. 

“Do you remember?” Jareth asks, wistfully. “ _ Really _ remember? All the beautiful things, all the lovely places. The labyrinth, and the castle –the fruit trees, with the most beautiful peaches – the glass bubbles that contain all the dreams of the world, the goblins, and the singing, and the dancing…”

And as Jareth says it, Toby is flooded with even more memories, with images of these beautiful things. The things he has always seen in his dreams but never put words to. 

Toby – what does Toby have here? His mother, middle-aged, menopausal, wondering where it all went; his distant father, sleeping with his secretary; his big sister, storming off-off-off Broadway, never home – wishing him away to the Goblin Kingdom might have been the nicest thing she ever did for him. And Toby’s never – he’s  _ never _ fit in. He’s always been slightly too odd, too out of touch with everything that seemed to be going on around him. He’s never had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend. Not even a friend, really. Jareth’s hand on his is more than he’s had in a long time.

Maybe it changed him, he realizes suddenly. Maybe going to the Labyrinth changed him somehow, irrevocably. He was only gone a little while but Toby knows enough of magic to know that's always been more than enough. That he was an innocent bystander in his sister's mistakes means nothing; He didn't stay, but that doesn't mean he was unchanged. 

“I…” he starts, and then can’t quite think of what he wanted to say.

Jareth holds out a gloved hand. A delicate glass bubble on the tip of his finger. 

“A dream,” Jareth says. “Just for you. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, Toby. A very long time for you to remember me.”

Toby barely breathes. His eyes slide shut when one of Jareth’s thumbs runs over his cheekbone, down the side of his face, to just the corner of his mouth. 

“I don’t come to just  _ anyone _ who calls my name,” Jareth murmurs. “You know exactly what it is you have to say.”

“Jareth,” Toby says, tremor all through his voice, like an awful throwback to just a few years ago when his voice would never stop cracking. “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Sweet boy. You’ve got all the power in the world, if only you’d take it.”

He couldn’t. Could he?

“Say it,” Jareth murmurs, and in the back of Toby’s mind there are a hundred goblins, a thousand, thousands upon thousands all murmuring the same thing. “ _ Say it _ .”  

“I wish the goblins would come and take me away,” Toby says, and lifts his chin. “Right now.”


End file.
